Tesla aims to build 6,000 Model 3s per week by late August
The company claims to have repeated weekly production of 5,000 units multiple times in July.
Tesla has set a more modest near-term production goal for the Model 3, aiming to build 6,000 units per week by late August.
The company finally reached its important 5,000/week target in July, a rate which has been "repeated ... multiple times" while simultaneously building 2,000 Model S and X units per week.
"We aim to increase production to 10,000 Model 3s per week as fast as we can," the automaker wrote in its quarterly letter to investors. "We believe that the majority of Tesla's production lines will be ready to produce at this rate by end of this year, but we will still have to increase capacity in certain places and we will need our suppliers to meet this as well. As a result, we expect to hit this rate sometime next year."
The company intends to improve flow through its existing lines and address bottlenecks going forward, rather than continuing to create new duplicate lines to achieve growing output targets.
The recent addition of a new 'tent' production line appeared to represent a parallel manual line for general assembly. Tesla blames production difficulties in this area on hundreds of robotic lifters that bring components to the line to be attached to the painted metal body.
"Due to the density of the line and the relatively high downtime of the lifters, ramping [main general assembly line] GA3 became substantially more complicated than we had anticipated," the company noted. "That said, significant progress has been made in the last few months, and GA3 is now expected to reach a production rate of 5,000 per week very soon."
The Fremont factory is expected to build approximately 50,000-55,000 Model 3s in Q3.
"A total vehicle output of 7,000 vehicles per week, or 350,000 per year, should enable Tesla to become sustainably profitable for the first time in our history - and we expect to grow our production rate further in Q3," the investor letter added.